Books like Mother Tongue — picked by fans

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mother’s family traces their ancestry to the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, and my family taught me to draw strength from our sense of being deeply rooted in the region. I attended the United World College of the American West, which has an extensive outdoors education program, and I learned there to value the natural world that I had previously taken for granted. I left New Mexico at nineteen and haven’t lived there a full year since. Reading and writing are my salve for my homesickness and my portal to the ever-changing world that is the American Southwest.

I love writing books that feature buildings and construction as a backdrop to life. I’ve worked as an interior designer for over 30 years, and now I teach design at a university in Sydney. Our homes offer so much more than four walls and a roof. They provide us with comfort and shelter. They offer security and stability. They help us stay sane and grounded in a sometimes confusing and turbulent world. I don’t think the importance of our homes can be underestimated.

I am the USS Midway Chair in Modern US Military History at San Diego State University. I’ve been teaching courses on the relationships between war and society for years and am fascinated not just by the causes and conduct of war, but, more importantly, by the costs of war. To me, Americans have a rather peculiar connection with war. In many ways, war has become an integral part of American conduct overseas—and our very identity. And yet we often don’t study it to question some of our basic assumptions about what war can do, what it means, and what the consequences are for wielding armed force so readily overseas.

I have loved history since I was a girl, visiting my grandparents in Virginia and reading American Girl books. I began to focus on women’s history when I learned in college just how much the women’s movement of the generation before mine had made my life possible. So much changed for American women in the ten years before I was born, and I wanted to know how that happened and how it fit into the broader political changes. That connection, between women making change and the bigger political scene, remains the core of my research. I have a B.A. in history and English from the University of Kentucky, and a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia.

I discovered labor history during a decade-long hiatus between my first and second years in college. Before that, I had never enjoyed reading about the past, unless it was in a novel. Then I discovered slave narratives and they inspired wider reading about workers’ lives. I loved both the drama of stories about resistance to oppression and the optimism I derived from understanding working people as historical protagonists. Now, as a professional historian, I often approach the past in a more academic way, but dramatic stories continue to attract me and knowledge that working people united have achieved great things in the past still gives me hope for humanity’s future. 

Pet names in romance can make or break a book, in my opinion. Sometimes, they can be offputting, but other times, pet names make me smile. They elevate the chemistry between characters–turn the heat up a notch on a steam scene, make you blush, and make you fall in love with the characters. When I read a pet name I can imagine the tone, level, and timbre. It makes me feel like I'm there in the pages with the characters. I think it's because a pet name or nickname is special. A person assigns it to you because they care–or, better yet, within the pages of a romance, they love.

There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.